Ryszard Woźniak

BORN 1956, Warszawa

Ryszard Woźniak’s work created in the 1980s features a poster-like quality, the use of symbols, and political and social commitment. He was the co-founder of the now-legendary painting collective Gruppa and co-editor of its periodical, Oj dobrze już. Since the 1990s, installation art, besides painting, has become the main field of his work. In 1981, he graduated from Prof. Stefan Gierowski’s studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Between 1982-1988, he taught at the Academy’s Studio of Painting Technologies and Techniques. Since 1992, he has taught painting at the Institute of Artistic.

Bibliothek

Until the late 1980s, Ryszard Woźniak was a member of the neo-expressionist "Gruppa" collective, with its characteristic, “wild” style. Bibliothek dates from a later period. The artist uses a limited colour range, reduces the spatial relationships, and, in a way, focuses on issues that go beyond the space of the image itself. Woźniak studies the notion of the library, of culture as a collection of metaphors, man’s relationship with nature. The painting bears an erudite, morphological title, characteristic of the artist, based on the word theke, Greek for “case.”

Framenmenti

Woźniak uses advertisement aesthetics: bold lettering, figures outlined with simple contours. The logic of a commercial message is disturbed, however, by how the painterly substance is emphasised: the trails of paint and the texture of the canvas. The letter clusters contain the word “frammenti,” Italian for “fragments,” but also, if one assumes a sufficiently imaginative approach, other words, such as “ferment.” This is precisely the strategy used in Woźniak’s paintings: disrupting order, creatively transforming the painting tradition, humorously commenting on reality.